Magadan: "The timing just didn't work out"_BINARY_944798

BOSTON -- Appearing on WEEI on Saturday afternoon, former Red Sox hitting coach Dave Magadan discussed his time in Boston and his decision to accept a position with the Texas Rangers

Tim Britton

BOSTON -- Appearing on WEEI on Saturday afternoon, former Red Sox hitting coach Dave Magadan discussed his time in Boston and his decision to accept a position with the Texas Rangers.

Magadan did have an option to return to the Red Sox. With the uncertainty surrounding the coaching staff following the season, Magadan asked for and was granted permission to speak with other teams by general manager Ben Cherington, "just to see if [he] could solidify a multi-year deal." Magadan said he spoke with six teams in all before coming to terms with the Rangers.

"Texas was very aggressive," he said, adding that he did speak with Terry Francona in Cleveland. "They really wanted me to be their hitting coach. That's the way it felt from the first second I started talking to them."

Magadan expressed some desire to return to Boston. The timing, however, wasn't in favor of that happening. He had earlier told WEEI.com that the Red Sox gave him until Friday to make a decision about his future.

"Rightly so, Boston put a time limit on how much I could talk to other teams. They had bigger fish to fry," he said. "If they'd been able to talk to John [Farrell] sooner or made a decision on even another manager at that point, while I was still pursuing these other things, maybe it would have turned out differently. The timing just didn't work out."

Magadan was diplomatic in discussing the one-year tenure of Bobby Valentine.

"It's never as bad as it's reported. Certainly we had our issues, starting in spring training with the Mike Aviles incident," Magadan said, referencing the oft-reported incident when Valentine ripped into Aviles early in the spring, potentially alienating some veterans on the team. "I think Bobby did a pretty good job on some of those things, where, if we did run into some potholes, he tried to correct it and communicate with the players.

"All I can really comment on is my relationship with Bobby. He treated me with respect from spring training all the way through the season. I feel like he trusted me. During this whole process I was going through with contemplating maybe leaving the Red Sox, I gave him a call on a couple different occasions to get his advice. When we parted ways, we still had a good relationship."

Magadan didn't say much about the idea, floated by Valentine, that the manager was undermined by some of his coaches.

"Just like any other situation, when you're with grown men as long as we're with each other during the season, you're going to have times where you rub each other the wrong way and say something you shouldn't say," he said. "But you move on; that's part of being a mature adult, realizing it's a long season and things happen during the year that guys don't like. You talk about it afterwards and you move on."

A tireless worker, Magadan enjoyed a very successful six-year tenure in Boston. Hired prior to the 2007 season by Theo Epstein -- "a guy who believed in me," Magadan said -- the former infielder presided over one of the league's best offenses on a yearly basis. Under Magadan, the Red Sox were one of the most patient and disciplined teams in baseball

Boston averaged 5.16 runs per game over Magadan's six seasons, during which it made three trips to the postseason and won a World Series.

This past season, the offense slipped precipitously, scoring barely 4.5 runs per game and slumping as the season progressed. At times later in the year, Magadan himself lamented the more impatient approach showed at the plate by Red Sox hitters. He explained on Saturday that much of that had to do with personnel and inexperience.

"The guys we had, especially in the last couple months of the season, were guys that were very raw," he said. "These guys' skill sets probably weren't conducive to them going up there and seeing five, six, seven pitches per at-bat. You don't want to take hitters out of their comfort zone. I wanted them to have success before trying to hammer home that you have to see pitches, you have to do this or do that.

"I don't really necessarily talk to guys about seeing pitches. I talk more about being disciplined with your approach, looking for a pitch in a certain area. If it's the first pitch, I want them to swing at it. They've got to have that mindset. Discipline doesn't always equate to necessarily seeing a ton of pitches or walking every time. It means I'm disciplined in what I'm looking for, and the byproduct of that a lot of times is a walk and the pitches per plate appearance go up."

Magadan had some trouble this past season with both Adrian Gonzalez and Jacoby Ellsbury, players he said got caught trying to live up to big 2011s.

"When you do that, you put pressure on yourself and try to take from the pitcher what's not there," he said. Gonzalez became too much of a guess hitter in Magadan's estimation, getting inside his own head at times. Ellsbury, meanwhile, kept trying to turn his year around with a single swing. Magadan expects "a great year" from the center fielder in 2013.

All that said, Magadan was appreciative of the time he got to spend in Boston.

"It was a great experience. Not everybody gets to spend six years in one place, especially as a hitting coach," he said. "I always felt like the front office had my back and believed in me. I got to spend six years in a special place, where the atmosphere is incredible every night. We won a lot of games, we won a championship."

Twitter: @TBritton_Projo

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